


how to bird (for dummies)

by princetemerarem (LocketShoru)



Category: Saint Seiya, 聖闘士星矢: 冥王神話 | Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas
Genre: AAverse, Anthropomorphic, Fluff, M/M, Mirrorverse, Oneshot, Shapeshifting, fic request
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-24
Updated: 2020-02-24
Packaged: 2021-02-19 10:48:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22876420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LocketShoru/pseuds/princetemerarem
Summary: Kagaho doesn't really bird correctly. He also doesn't human correctly. Either way, everyone around him gets to tell him what he's feeling before he recognizes it. You know what both birds and humans do for the exact same reason? Scream. Loudly and with deep irritation with life.
Relationships: Garuda Aiacos/Bennu Kagaho
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9





	how to bird (for dummies)

**Author's Note:**

> OKAY SO. First things first: This is a request from Alhena from the Aries Hell Group. I said "I have a five hour layover and a six hour flight home after that, hit me with something to write" because I see my fic schedule and I go "Nah" like an asshole. If you want me to write you a fic, tell me what fic and give me a reason why I should do it. Anything in the Mirrorverse or Aeternum is pretty much auto-accepted if I can figure out the logistics. Anything TLC is at least 75/25 in your favour, depending on how much I like the result / the ship in question. I enjoy requests, and if you want 'em, throw them at me. :D  
> Secondly! This isn't true Mirrorverse because in actual Mirrorverse these two are a brotp- Kagaho is with Dohko and (currently) has triplet children because it's Cute, and Aiacos and Shion have a daughter. However. Everything Kagaho does holds up, his shapeshifting and Spectre-speak and pretty much all background interactions. So here is your official 'Pale explains some Spectre animal weirdness and just kind of expects you to know it from here on out' fic, so hell yea.  
> Thirdly! I know I said new Aeternum. It's mostly written but I didn't like it so I'll rewrite it and also I have most of my midterms this week. So uhhhh yeah. I'll try. At least I'm writing. :p

It started with four blunt words, sharp and rude and deeply cutting. To be quite frank, it was almost impossible to miss. Spectre language, especially when nonverbal, was a difficult thing to learn, and there were several dialects that aren’t always understood. Especially when it came to the Mirrorbound, who had honed the art over thousands of years and dozens of lifetimes dedicated to war and the necessity of code, and even more, the awareness of their own mortality ensuring that they were always at least halfway into an animalistic panic that kept them from ever rising into any sort of relaxation.

Kagaho _wanted_ to be less than insulted, but ah, deciphering the language of any one of the elder Spectres usually required harassing someone who did understand it until they felt like translating. Most of the time, Pharaoh would tell him if he bought drinks for the night, and would translate an actually painful insult into the actual meaning of something less agonizing. He didn’t always have the answers, though, and he’d pointed him in another direction for this latest disaster that hurt more than he wanted to admit.

“Let’s see… The Lord Garuda is Sherpa, native to currently-Nepal, around the Great Mountain’s base… Sherpa, Sherpa, hm…”

He leaned up against the shelf, ignoring the way it seemed to debate about creaking at the weight, watching the other Spectre carefully for his every movement. The barest flutter of wings, how many times he was blinking per half-minute, the shuffling of his footsteps. Missing such cues got you killed, sometimes, and he didn’t know how to read any division other than his own. Not that it helped, either, that the Wyverns mirrored whoever they were talking to and the Griffons concealed their every move, disappearing into the background until they started throwing sharp things that were also usually on fire.

Luné pulled a bound stack of scrolls from the shelf and turned on his heel, a wing of his surplice beckoning Kagaho forward, deeper into the archives, towards some unknown light source.

“I could-“ he began, before Luné cut him off.

“If you set yourself on fire in my archives I will have you guillotined like the French just put into style,” he answered bluntly. “I don’t care how bright the light is. These scrolls are flammable, and if you want my help, you play by my rules.”

“Last I checked, you weren’t king of the archives,” he muttered.

“The last that _I_ have checked, you were a birdbrain asking me why Aiacos hates you when ever-so-clearly, something else is afoot. You require a translation. I require you to not set valuable writings on _fucking fire_ , Garuda.”

He didn’t really have a returning remark for that, and decided just to stay quiet. Luné took it as the agreement that it was, and marched on towards what did seem to be a small lounge, with a sofa and a table, with a lamp of witch-flame keeping it bright, if a little on the violet side. It was easier on the eyes, anyhow.

“What did he call you, exactly?” Luné asked, placing the scrolls very gently on the table and unwrapping the leather cord keeping them tied.

“Uh, _nina mero atmo ko_ ,” he answered, attempting to hit the accent correctly. “I’m pretty sure it’s an insult.”

Luné produced a quill from somewhere in his surplice, scratching it down and scanning through the notes. Kagaho waited, fluffing out the metal feathers of his wings with growing anxiety. On one hand, it was a normal-sounding insult, but… Aiacos’ face had been anything but his usual laughing about it. And if he’d screwed up, he wanted to be able to fix it. It would make him a better warrior. More worthy of the gifts the Underworld had given him.

Luné abruptly started laughing, a muffled sort of noise that he had no right to be making. Kagaho knelt beside him, attempting to look over his shoulder to see what made it so funny. Luné shifted over so he could see, and gently pointed at a translation.

Kagaho’s heart started to race, and then very abruptly, jumped into his throat once he’d given the translation a once-over. He read it again. And again.

“He’s got to be _joking_ ,” he muttered. “He said it like…No, that can’t be the right translation. It can’t be!”

Between bouts of laughter, Luné started wrapping up the scrolls again. “It is standard, by Mirrorbound etiquette. You have to answer him, you know. He’s going to avoid you until you chase him down.”

“There Is no way!” he snapped, rising, whipping a wing out to balance himself. “There is absolutely no way. That… that isn’t even how Aiacos acts when he’s nervous!”

“What, pretends to be shy and stammers? That is not the Lord Garuda’s nervousness. Speaking as someone who has spent thousands of years honing his ability to read the Judges… That is what he acts like when he wants you to think he’s nervous. It was a knife’s slice of a thing, wasn’t it? Rude and sharp and brittle. Millennia, and I will still never stop laughing at how he draws up his walls. No, if it can cut him, he ensures it cuts everyone else first. Go do something to make him feel wanted and get out of my archives.”

He huffed and stalked out of the room, wings fluttering an anxious chime.

“Are you _sure_ this is what I should be doing?” he asked, glancing up at the person-sized bird sitting happily on a pillow on the dining room’s table. The army was divided into several places of residence: Hades’ attendants usually kept to Judecca, the Judges and their inner circles kept to their temples, those who didn’t have anyone else kept to the bunkers, and those with families – like himself – kept to Dis, the city that encircled the four temples like the guardian of the gates that it was.

Bennu let out a chirp of approval, reaching down to lift a red, sparkling ribbon from the pile of supplies he’d found from robbing the Alraune gardens blind. Queen _probably_ wouldn’t mind, and if he did, firebird beat plant-that-screams-a-lot every time. Kagaho took it from the surplice’s beak and wrapped it gingerly around the outside of the bouquet.

He leaned back a bit in his chair, taking a look at his handiwork. Bennu had insisted on every flower in it, some nineteen strong, and had been very clear that he not damage a single petal of any one. It had to be perfect, and Bennu simply wasn’t telling him why.

He felt a quiet presence creep up behind him, and he reached back automatically, slipping his hand under Sui’s veil and cupping his cheek. Sui stepped up to the back of his chair and set his chin down on it, his veil actually pushed back over his hair and looking interested.

“Sooo… I’m going to assume you don’t actually know what this is, otherwise I feel like you would’ve discussed this with me first,” he remarked, slipping both of his hands into Kagaho’s thick, short locks.

Oh, no. Kagaho sighed deeply, feeling Bennu flutter with the movement. “Great. You know Mirror-talk better than I do, and I’m the Spectre here.”

“That’s Spectre-talk, not Mirror-talk,” Sui cut in, now hiding a laugh. He was getting quite tired of being the clueless one in the room. “Mirror-talk is whatever Lord Griffon is yammering about. Spectre-talk is that bouquet, which, by the way, is actually a marriage proposal so you should maybe think about that before going off and giving that to… whoever you’re trying to seduce here. _Onii-san_ , you’re kind of bad at this.”

He barely heard the ending remark. “The bouquet is what now?”

“Marriage proposal. You know how Lord Griffon ran off with his beau a while back and Sir Balrog found a bouquet in his room and the entire division was kinda losing their minds? Yeah, it was one of these and I think they still haven’t forgiven him.”

He looked at Bennu. Bennu looked back at him impassively, the distinct air of ‘Didn’t do it’ wrapped throughout their cosmos. He glowered at them. “How about this. I am going to go to my room and I am going to lay on the floor and scream like I am being murdered. If Alone comes by, tell him I’m having a day and to please beat Aiacos’ ass silly for me.”

Sui laughed, and when Kagaho rose to head to his room, Sui linked his arms around his neck and his legs around Kagaho’s waist, and he carried him down to their shared room. It wasn’t decorated very much on his own side, though Sui had taken to putting up every kind of decoration that he could, making his side of the room his own. There was a rice-paper divider in the middle, though they rarely used it – Kagaho preferred to know where Sui was at every moment, and Sui liked making sure his older brother wasn’t bleeding out in an alleyway somewhere without a recourse to come back.

He dropped onto his bed facedown, Sui somehow slipping out of his grasp on the way down. A pillow thumped against the back of his head and he ignored it, preferring instead to start screeching like the bird that he really was into the mattress. It was one thing to find out that Aiacos’ supposed insult was actually some sort of declaration of love, apparently. It was another for Bennu and Luné to tagteam him and get him to make a marriage proposal of a bouquet of flowers in return, without either actually telling him what it was. It was a wildly different field when Sui recognized it and he didn’t.

He screamed until he ran out of breath, then lifted his head to breathe, and dropped it back onto the pillow to start screaming again. Sui whacked him again on the back of the head with his own pillow.

“Are you done screaming yet, or nah?” he asked, whacking him again. “I’m just gonna keep hitting you.”

He groaned inwardly, lifting his head. “What’re you hitting me for? Ain’t my fault Bennu’s an asshole.”

“Do you want my advice or not?”

Kagaho sighed and rolled over onto his side to face his younger brother, seated calmly cross-legged on his bed, his skirt around his ankles and his veil pulled back. He looked less tired than he ever had in life; the Underworld worked him hard but he’d never gone hungry, had never been sick and had never really had to worry again that Kagaho would disappear and they’d find his body a fortnight later rotting in some alleyway covered in wounds.

Sui was five years younger than he was: nineteen and fourteen, five years since he had died and five years since he had decided to commit the crime their mother had been unjustly executed for. Five years since he’d become a Spectre, demanding the return of the one who never should have ever thought it was his fault.

“What sort of knowledge do you have, o great sage?” he asked, sarcastic. Sui rolled his eyes, fluffing out his feathers in indignation. It made his face a little poofier-looking.

“Well, you have two options.” He held out a gloved hand with two fingers raised, looking nonchalant. “You can either A, go up to whoever this is – which you’d better tell me, by the way – and tell them you need it plainer. Or B, you can just follow Bennu’s lead and tell them whatever you’re trying to say in Bennu-speak. We’re phoenixes, and everyone says it. We’re one part human, two parts Spectre, and three parts Bennu phoenix. Act like it and tell them like a bird would. Works pretty well for me when I’m getting harassed by Vanessa.”

The last time that he’d checked that Druj-Nasu-tèktos Vanessa had been harassing him, Sui had just set the hem of his skirt on fire and threatened to eat her until she went away, which he honestly hadn’t really understood, but it had _worked_. He nodded, slowly. “You’re saying I should either admit to Aiacos I haven’t a fucking clue, or just trust my instincts and actually acknowledge all of this.”

“Oh, come _on_. You’ve been a Spectre for five whole years and then some. You seriously don’t think of yourself as at least part a phoenix yet?” Sui ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head. It was true, now that he thought about it… He’d held onto his humanity with every bit of strength he still had, insisting that he was still human. Even if he tended to almost always have a tail like a black-and-red peacock, and constantly scratch at the feathers trailing down his spine.

Really, it had been a long time since he’d actually been human. He sighed again, and the noise that came out of him was far more of a bird’s trill than a human’s sigh. He closed his eyes, wondering vaguely if it all was as stupid as he felt.

There was the one thing… Most Spectres couldn’t shift into their animal forms voluntarily. They didn’t expect him to, either – it was stress-based, and only that. It meant most of them had tails and teeth and chunks of fur, or scales, or feathers, and it wasn’t uncommon to see someone walking beast-footed around and hissing at whoever eyed their (admittedly raw) food. But…

He took a deep breath, and relaxed. It was just him and Sui, and he never needed to think about where Bennu got their powers, only that it was there when he needed it. He took another breath, attempting to allow his muscles to stop tensing up.

For a moment, he felt almost weightless. And then his feet were under him, and he didn’t recall his arms being at his sides, and when his eyes opened, the room was crystalline clear with a faint light to one side that hadn’t been there before. Sui looked stunned, and then broke out in a grin.

He meant to ask “What?”, like he didn’t already know deep in his gut what had just happened. What came out of his beak was a caw, like Bennu when they were confused, and what came next was spreading his wings and taking flight.

If Luné’s translation was correct and Aiacos really had called him the mirror of his heart, then it only made sense to reciprocate such things. He was going to need something blue. Something blue, food, and something he couldn’t quite name, and…

It wasn’t _acceptable_ to leave his mate wondering where he was. Certainly not when anything complex was involved. He flew into the kitchen, Sui a pace behind him and Bennu gone from their pillow, and he scooped up the first blue object he saw. A dishtowel, but at least it was new. The thought barely crossed his mind. He was out the open window and gone a moment later.

To his delight, Pharaoh was off-duty and had no issues letting him into Antenora with a cheer of surprise at his transformation. Even better, Aiacos didn’t exactly bother with nonsensical little things like ‘locking his bedroom door’ and ‘cleaning off his nightstand’. These were all easy things to fix as a bird, and somehow, as a bird the first problem was that Aiacos wasn’t exactly a neat-freak.

He set his blue dishtowel on the corner of the bed to start, and sought about taking all the dishes out of the room. Without arms it was difficult, but he had claws and a beak and the human ingenuity to wrap things in a bath towel and carry them into the kitchen. Violate looked at him, mildly concerned.

“Kagaho, you’re not a stress-cleaner,” she remarked. “Something on your mind?”

He set the dishes down in the sink and squawked at her, not really expecting her to understand. “Chirp chirp, fine then,” she said, taking another sip of her coffee. He huffed a trill of annoyance, landing neatly on the counter, the annoyance twinging into irritation, and a blink later, he found his legs swinging off the counter and his hands at his hips.

“I have to make a nest,” he blurted, his voice still awkwardly high. He fluffed his tail out, faintly aware Violate still had a foot and at least fifty pounds of solid muscle on him. He could still sit on the counter and be technically taller than she was.

“A nest. Right. Listen, it’s the middle of winter, can’t you wait for Ostara like the rest of us?” she asked, setting down her coffee cup to fold her arms at him and look generally rebuking. “I know you birds are weird but it isn’t time to Ride yet.”

“I don’t see what it has to do with you,” he answered, fluffing his tail out more on an instinct. It really didn’t have anything to do with her, and if she thought about challenging him on it, well. He’d lose, and on the grounds of intimidation he’d also lose, but he didn’t really think she had enough of an interest in their Judge to get in his way.

She looked at him, one eyebrow raised. “Right. Did he do something to mess with your head, or did you finally break down and admit you’re a bird in your own head? Because I think you need to talk it over before you go flying into danger.”

The last thing he needed was another person – _especially_ Violate – telling him what his emotions were before he figured them out on his own. It was getting to be a bit much. He huffed another trill, and in the movement of standing up, caught air between his feathers and flew off back to Aiacos’ quarters, snagging the towel with a claw on the way by. He wasn’t going to wash all the dishes, but he could still beat back the clutter into acceptable nesting levels.

Nesting? When did _that_ ever cross his mind? He dropped midflight and stumbled facefirst into the corner of Aiacos’ mattress, shaking off feathers with his surprise. Lesson learned: don’t question the birdliness, or he would stop being in the form of one, and now his nose was bloody. He wiped the blood onto the hem of his tunic and kept on going, now with thumbs. All the dishes had to be taken out and the clutter cleared off, and all the spare clothes on the floor had to be put away.

It actually only took a few moments, and he was whistling by the end of it, some birdsong or another that was occasionally interrupted by Violate laughing from over what he was pretty sure was her third cup of coffee. Knowing her, it wouldn’t have surprised him at all if she drank four cups more than she’d wanted to if it meant she could still laugh at him. Some things never did change.

He shifted back into the form of a bird when he was done and settled onto one of Aiacos’ eight pillows (if there was a reason for it, he didn’t question it much, not in the haze he’d found himself in), prepared to wait, though for what, he wasn’t sure. It made more sense just to let the bird instincts show him the way, and follow through until he understood it.

Fortunately, he wasn’t waiting long. Aiacos stumbled in not long later looking supremely exhausted, snapping his fingers and shutting off the witch-light. He paused, looking up at the lamp on the ceiling that held the light, and snapped his fingers again, turning it back on.

“The fuck…?” he muttered. “Didn’t leave the light on…” He looked back to his bed and froze, every feather suddenly still as stone. He looked beat, even from the sight of a bird, which still had a faint light now exactly positioned over Aiacos’ shoulder. Kagaho trilled at him.

Aiacos relaxed, looking at the bird he was, and answered with a chirp of his own. ‘ _You okay?_ ’ he asked.

Kagaho fluffed out part of his tail, finding that he understood the other’s birdtalk. ‘ _I cleaned up,_ ’ he answered, puffing out his chest a little.

‘ _I can see that._ ’ He stepped closer, raising his hands to where Kagaho could clearly see them, shaking his hips a little until his tail, short to his knees and not at all fluffy, was fully fanned out. The tail was prettier than his hips were, in the moment. Aiacos cleared his throat when he was a pace away from the bed. _‘Shift back for me._ ’

Kagaho shifted position, and found himself mostly human with the action, tail still flared and mostly still beast-footed. Aiacos looked at him, his expression mildly concerned. “Didn’t think you’d be a voluntary shifter, but you sure mastered it quickly. I’ll take it.” He let out a shaky laugh, like he didn’t know how to properly react. The light by his shoulder was gone.

Kagaho held quite still, wondering what his next move would be. Aiacos rubbed his palm over one side of his face, then looked up at him.

“Be that way, then,” he said, and smiled. It was a birdlike smile, slow and raw and with the barest shimmer of pointed teeth displayed. On him, it was perfect. He moved forward, faster than he could see, and the next thing he knew, he was on his back on the bed, his ankles by the pillows, Aiacos atop of him with his every feather flared out for emphasis.

When Aiacos’ lips met his, he didn’t even flinch. He knew it, mostly as a bird and not so much as a human, but he was thinking more like a bird than a human at the moment, and that meant returning the kiss. Aiacos’ tongue brushed against his lips, and he parted them, and he thought he might not actually need to know what was going on. He was certain, at least for the moment, that he could figure it out on the way.

**Author's Note:**

> Also, for those of you who don't know about this cool trivia fact: that faint light Kagaho sees in birdform? That's actually a thing birds do: that's a magnetic compass! There's a faint light in a bird's vision that points directly north, because they have a magnetic compass in their brains I guess. He can only see it if he's sufficiently bird enough for it, and that goes for all our birds and other animals that are close enough to have that nifty feature. :D


End file.
